A Cool Mechanic For An Arena Board Game

Eye for an Eye is an Aussie made game that's basically a combat arena for a bunch of characters that look like they were borne out of Plants vs Zombies. The neat part about it, however, is that you can play it as a turn-based game or in real-time.

The Melbourne-based Darwin Games relaunched Eye for an Eyeon Kickstarter a few days ago, having run a campaign on the platform earlier this year. It attracted almost a couple of hundred backers, but fell short of its $52,000 target, so after reaching out to board gamers the Aussie studio opted to try again with a smaller funding goal.

I missed the original campaign completely, but there's something neat about how it plays out that I want to call out. The basic principle is that you're a leader of a tribe, and you battle other leaders in one of two arenas (which you choose by flipping the board over).

The whole game is dice-based, with dice assigned to actions on your tribal card and player board if they match the corresponding symbol. If you're playing in turn-based mode, you carry out actions sequentially with a few re-rolls to get the results you need.

But if you're playing in real-time? It's way more frantic. Here's what that looks like.

The game supports up to six players and has five different modes, including a free-for-all style mode, a team-based offering, Domination, King of the Hill and Nymphlet Ceremony. The different modes is largely designed to increase focus on movement and positioning, rather than just attacking all the time, which would help when you're dealing with larger players.

Having turn and real-time modes will probably make the game more palatable, particularly if you're dealing with six people - I don't want to imagine how confused that could get. Anyway, you can watch the pitch video below and check out the rest of the campaign here.

Triple AAA games nailing the brief. Indie games surprising people out of nowhere, and expansions and patches that completely turn a game around. It's been a good year for games - now it's time for you to vote for your favourite.